


Where Is A Place With Which To Flee

by orphan_account



Category: Mary Russell - King
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Yuletide 2009
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:07:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alistair Hughenfort wears Ali Hazr's skin with enthusiastic unease.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where Is A Place With Which To Flee

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jayest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jayest/gifts).



> Thanks be to prodigy and Relia for tireless encouragement. Friendship is diamonds, and betareading is gold.

As Alistair Hughenfort wades through the sea outside Haifa, he's relieved to find he's fallen in love at last. He's been warned that Palestine now is nothing like the _One Thousand And One Nights_ that started all of this, his and Marsh's frantic schoolboy Arabic -- but that's long ago and far away, it seems. All there is now are the scrubby hills that look the same as they must have when the Ottoman rule began and will look the same when it ends, lit by a chill blue dawn. He looks to Marsh: Marsh is hungry, for the desert, and both impatient with the cadre of British smugglers who mainly thought they're escorting two Eton boys sheltering in the Intelligence service and looking for a more _outrée_ summer holiday than Paris, unknowing of the danger that they face in the Turks. Ali gets snide; Maurice doesn't.

They sit on the hill squeezing out their clothes, burying anything they don't need -- can't need. Both have a swift argument about Alistair's Hughenfort pocket-watch, something he brought on the journey out of sentimentality and "senselessness" and now must be buried. Its life could only end in being pawned, or earning both of them a deserved beating from any Turks or Britons who espy its existence. Marsh spoons grit and sand over it and its fellows: he's always more willing to discard anything of their former lives, burying William Maurice Hughenfort in the dirt with the watch and the papers and uncharacteristic anger, his beard still an unfamiliar object on his face.

Ali's been practicing with kohl, meant to keep out the evil eye but instead making him look like a pantomime Aladdin. His Arabic still sounds like it came out of a London schoolroom. He lets Marsh do the burying and looks out instead on Haifa, a speckled scrawl of arches and flat little houses gathered around the ragged bush of the ancient port.

"Imagine the Crusaders of Lionheart, coming into the bay," Ali says passionately.

His cousin rocks back on his heels, smoothing over the graveyard of their Hughenfort lives. "Imagine the Turks doing the same." Marsh is indelibly sober by nature. "Richard Lionheart won't be loved here, for God's sake. Don't be -- "

Bristling. " -- an idiot?"

"_Unwary._ I was going to say _unwary_."

Burial finished without so much a prayer, they stand in their robes and their (amazingly) uncomfortable sandals, waiting for the dawn. Alistair feels as though his skin has been peeled off and discarded in the sea, and suddenly he's afraid. He wants to say, Marsh, can we do this? Will we survive this? and though he's passionately happy to live here, passionately happy to die here anywhere away from Justice Hall, Marsh uses his second sight to take his cousin and kiss him gently on either cheek. Alistair avoids his eye.

"Ali Hazr," he says, in his own perfect Bedouin lilt: "_'Each man's bird of fate have we fastened on his neck, and on the Day of Resurrection we shall produce for him a Book which he will meet wide open.'_"

That Koran's been worn thin on the voyage from Cairo. "And mine will say: thank God I'm here in the Judean hills and not with your wife in Paris. I'll get my sand legs," says Alistair. And at Marsh's raised eyebrows -- "_Insh'allah_, God willing. Mahmoud."

"_Insh'allah_. Ali."

As brothers, not cousins, they go off hand in hand to the hills of Judaea.

* * *

Marsh tells him that if he doesn't think of him as Mahmoud -- let alone the thousand other things an Englishman has to do to pass as not only a Bedu but a Mohammedan -- they'll never make it past Jenin. He encourages him to think _Mahmoud_ in the silence of his thoughts, to read the Koran cover to cover as they ramble through the desert like mules. Marsh (damn, Mahmoud) has bought one on their journey to their British Intelligence connection, and Ali hates the thing already. He reads the _Surat al-Asr: by afternoon, verily man is in loss._ (He knows it's not the context, but that's how he is with the mule.) His love affair with the desert is tempestuous: he loves Palestine, but Palestine does not love Alistair Hughenfort.

Mahmoud says: _Palestine will not love Alistair Hughenfort easily, but it will love Ali Hazr. Masha'allah._

They kept the Lee Enfield rifle. Easy enough to barter for its bullets, and as Ma -- _Mahmoud, Mahmoud, Mahmoud_ says, only a fool goes into the depths of the desert with no gun. His Arabic is perfect, flawless. Marsh has been a _friend_ of the Intelligence service some years now, and Alistair is aware that he's come along as a younger cousin and bosom friend and lesser officer simply on his word. A tagalong. Superfluous.

Mahmoud has faith in him. Mahmoud and he have loved each other since before he can remember, lost in the chilly depths of the Hall and the love not lost between William Maurice Hughenfort and his father. Alistair was a spare, he always was. When they were at Eton together everyone expressed disbelief that they were such bosom bows: "Most _brothers_ won't look each other in the face when they're at school, let alone cousins," someone had said. Even then Marsh (**Mahmoud**) had been a kind of God.

Maurice had his black moods. Maurice had his depressions. For someone so calm, so even, so straight and just and good, dark clouds could cover his horizon until it dimmed out what there was of Marsh left and hollowed him out until -- _don't shut me out_, Alistair remembers, his own hysteria. _Don't shut me out._

Once in these periods he took a soft pencil and did the Bible a heresy, underlining, passing it in a particularly dreary chapel session next to his older cousin in their pew. It had been a plea. It had been outright begging. It embarrasses him even now, to remember:

Your love to me was wonderful, surpassing the love of women.

Maurice (Mahmoud, _Mahmoud_) had smiled, and blessed the act by pressing his lips to the spine of Ali's Holy Book. After that he knew he was to be all right, blushing right up to the tips of his ears. Arrogantly enough, Alistair has always done things arrogantly enough. He'd been fourteen. You do _stupid_ things when you're fourteen.

(The Hughenforts have their own skeletons in their closets, enough to furnish any number of catacombs. No love, for example, surpasses the love of women for Iris Sutherland.)

They weathered some time in Cairo, which Ali found irritatingly playing pretend. He and Mahmoud sat there for a month, cracking the sesame seeds of hot semits underneath their teeth as his older cousin corrected his grammar. Corrected his walk, his gesture. Starved him of water: _water is gold in the desert_, he'd said, Alistair thought a little tritely. They were to be Bedu, walking wherever they could walk, making their own private war against the Ottoman Empire, all in the name of scraps of information for the well-dressed men in Government who wouldn't be out of place in Justice damned Hall. _Justicia fortitudo mea est: righteousness is my strength._ Both he and Mahmoud knew they were running away. From righteousness especially.

"We'll have a camel?" Ali had said before a bit hopefully, before the horrible reality of what quadruped was to come.

Marsh had given him one of his long, dark-eyed, somber graveyard looks. "A mule."

"A _mule_."

"'_Take provision for the journey, but the best provision is piety, so show piety unto --_ '"

"A **mule**."

"Are you afraid?"

That's something Mahmoud has always asked him, many times. Dressed in his stiff Eton uniform with the straw boater for the first time, _are you afraid?_ Standing as one of the ridiculous three witnesses to Marsh and Iris' shambolic French wedding: _are you afraid?_ The dark boat where the captain refused to get any closer to the dangerous Haifa coast -- _are you afraid?_ Maurice knows where to stick his knife. He takes it and he rams it in hard just underneath Alistair's heart, not into it, but so that it beats against the organ and can feel the sharpness of his blade.

"Now that we're standing here where we always wanted to stand," said Ali, more heatedly than he'd like, "don't ask me if I'm afraid again, _Mahmoud_."

(They have the mule. They don't name it. That's because it came directly from Hell.)

_Are you afraid._

It's a challenge, is what it is. Mahmoud also asked it as Marsh, levelling the ancient arming sword at him (Alistair had to make do with a thick stick) when they were children, duelling. Their duels were always Araby duels. Crusader and Mameluke. _Are you afraid_. "I'm not afraid," he'd cry out, impassioned, insulted, spurred to attack.

_Don't ask me if I'm afraid again, Mahmoud._ Which is, in its own way, him growing up. He reads the Koran page to page to page and tries to find peace in every sura. _Don't ask if I'm afraid._

* * *

Palestine accepts Ali Hazr and swallows him whole, rather than loves him. That is nothing to be afraid of either.

* * *

There's only one time he's afraid. Only once. He and Mikhail, white-turbanned, louche Mikhail went espying troop movements, out into the lowlands -- and Mahmoud was caught by nothing more crushingly mundane than a group of Turks out digging up a cache. They caught Mahmoud with his notebook and his cipher, and they took Mahmoud and tortured him in ways that Ali has had to retrace over by the wounds. The broken fingers which the _mukhtar's_ son eased back into place, splintered the bone of his, praise be to God, off hand. The scar where they scored the knife sharply up his chin and right underneath his eye, threatening, asking, pinpointing it at the eyeball as his face was awash with blood. They shot them all. He and Mikhail the Druse shot them all. Mahmoud would have been irritated at the waste of bullets.

But Ali's hatred for the Turks then was as great as Mikhail's hatred for the Turks, and Mikhail hit him again and again as he cried out wanting to be in the sickroom where his brother's fingers were slowly being put back together.

Afterwards -- when they put him away at the back of the poor villa with the food and the dirty clothes in case the Turks came calling -- Ali sits with his brother and prays. Prays until he's weary of it, prays until he harms every rounded face of his prayer beads. Every bargain with God. _Let him be whole, let him be whole. God willing. Let him be whole._ He has nothing to give God, nor to even offer God in lieu. Not the God of Palestine. Not even the God who apparently walked in England's green fields in ancient times -- that hymn always irritates him, damn it all to Hell.

When Mahmoud's awake and slurring on opiates, they tell him so and let him in to see. He kneels down by the makeshift bed and prays there instead, knuckles white, eyes fixed on the bloodied face on the hard blankets. It's a long while before his brother (he is his brother) reaches out to touch his face, to see him again. Low and drugged he asks:

"Are you afraid, Alistair?"

"Yes," says Ali, "yes, I am afraid." Marsh's fingers are at his face, clumsy. To make sure he is there, to understand that he is there now. "Never leave me. I am afraid. Never leave me, I was afraid of a world where there was nothing but Hughenforts and now I am afraid of a world where there is no you. There is nothing but that. There never was. Stay with me."

For long moments his brother can't speak.

"Your love to me was wonderful," says Mahmoud eventually, lisping it in his exhaustion, and his eyes flutter close as dark bruises on his face.

Alistair Hughenfort is relieved to find he has _always_ had love, and unflinchingly knows its face at last.


End file.
